Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8302583" data-attributes="member: 16814">There is not general advice, though -- you're promoting a phantom.  There's almost no advice on how to run these scenes in some games, and very good advice in others -- advice that generally suggests using the mechanical parts of those systems.  And, this play is absolutely not at all confined to OSR, or even definitional of it.  What it does, somewhat, define is early RPG systems where Free Kriegsspiel approaches were the norm because the systems were building to catch up.  But, even, then, games like Traveler had mechanical systems to govern these things.  There are vocal proponents of this approach in 5e.  This isn't OSR related at all really.But, to the main point, it's also not skilled play.  Skilled play is leveraging the system to achieve player goals within the scope of the game.  Doing an improv scene with the GM is not leveraging the system -- it's sidestepping it.  That you can do this with skill is well and good, and I'm not about to argue it cannot be done with skill as improv acting is very much a thing you can have lots of skill in, but it's not leveraging the system.  This is detectable because this doesn't interact with the system at all, it's entirely outside the game system.  You have inputs into the improv scene from the system (maybe) and the outputs possibly feed back into the system, but this function of acting out with the GM and having the GM then decide what their character does here is not within the system of the game (it's possible it is, but I'm not familiar with that system, and it's not any OSR or legit OS game I'm aware of).  You're stepping out to do a thing, and that thing is, as I said, so dependent on the individuals involved that its going to be idiosyncratic to a large degree.Meanwhile, knowing that you can leverage your build choices with a skill or check system, and use play to leverage additional improvements to make that better, is very much skilled play.  And, to a large part, some of this can look similar to your proposed version.  The difference is that the player can see going in what the decision structure will be and can play to that.  If it's just the GM deciding how well you acted your part, then the player cannot see the decision structure, and cannot make good moves to improve it.  Unless we're going to outright state that social manipulation of the GM is part and parcel of this, because that's the only real tool a player has to deploy into an opaque decision making framework.</blockquote>

Verification